Modern Science and Anarchism : Chapter 6

1903

People

(1842 - 1921) ~ Russian Father of Anarcho-Communism : As anarchism's most important philosophers he was in great demand as a writer and contributed to the journals edited by Benjamin Tucker (Liberty), Albert Parsons (Alarm) and Johann Most (Freiheit). Tucker praised Kropotkin's publication as "the most scholarly anarchist journal in existence." (From : Spartacus Educational Bio.) • "To recognize all men as equal and to renounce government of man by man is another increase of individual liberty in a degree which no other form of association has ever admitted even as a dream." (From : "Communism and Anarchy," by Peter Kropotkin, 1901.) • "...the strength of Anarchy lies precisely in that it understands all human faculties and all passions, and ignores none..." (From : "The Conquest of Bread," by Peter Kropotkin, 1906.) • "...all that is necessary for production-- the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge--all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression..." (From : "The Conquest of Bread," by Peter Kropotkin, 1906.)

Description

The Causes of this Mistake.--The Teaching of the Church: "the World is steeped in Sin."--The Government's Inculcation of the same view of "Man's Radical Perversity."--The Views of Modern Anthropology upon this subject.--The Development of forms of life by the "Masses," and the LAw.--Its Two-fold Character.

Modern Science and Anarchism

Peter Kropotkin

This text was taken from my copy translated from the Russian original by
David A. Modell and published by The Social Science Club of Philadelphia in 1903.

VI.

In these erroneous views, however, Spencer does not stand alone. Following
Hobbes, all the philosophy of the nineteenth century continues to look upon the
savages as upon bands of wild beasts which lived an isolated life and fought
among themselves over food and wives, until some benevolent authority appeared
among them and forced them to keep the peace. Even such a naturalist as Huxley
advocated the same views as Hobbes, who maintained that in the beginning people
lived in a state of war, fighting "each against all,"1 till, at last, owing to a
few advanced persons of the time, the "first society" was created (see his
article "The Struggle for Existence--a Law of Nature.") Even Huxley, therefore,
failed to realize that it was not Man who created society, but that social life
existed among animals much earlier than the advent of man. Such is the power of
deep-rooted prejudice.

Were we, however, to trace the history of this prejudice, it would not be
difficult to convince ourselves that it originated chiefly in religions and among
their representatives. The secret leagues of sorcerers, rain-makers, and so on,
among primitive clans, and later on, the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Indian,
Hebrew and other priesthoods, and later still the Christian priests, have always
been endeavoring to persuade men that they lay deep in sin, and that only the
intercession of the shaman, the magician, and the priest can keep the evil spirit
from assuming control over man, or can prevail with a revengeful God not to visit
upon man his retribution for sin. Primitive Christianity, it is true, faintly
attempted to break up this prejudice; but the Christian Church, adhering to the
very language of the gospels concerning "eternal fire" and "the wrath of God,"
intensified it still more. The very conception of a son of God who had come to
die for "the redemption of sin," served as a basis for this view. No wonder that
later on "the Holy Inquisition" subjected people to the most cruel tortures and
burned them slowly at the stake in order to afford them an opportunity of
repenting and of saving themselves thereby from eternal torment. And not the
Catholic Church alone, but all other Christian Churches vied with one another in
investing all kinds of tortures in order to better people "steeped in sin." Up
to the present time, nine hundred and ninety-nine persons in a thousand still
believe that natural calamities--droughts, floods, earthquakes, and epidemic
diseases--are sent by a Divine Being for the purpose of recalling sinful mankind
to the right path. In this belief an enormous majority of our children are being
brought up to this very day.

At the same time the State, in its schools and universities, countenances the
same belief in the innate perversity of man. To prove the necessity of some
power that stands above society and inculcates in it the moral principles (with
the aid of punishments inflicted for violations of "moral law," for which, by
means of a clever trick, the written law is easily substituted),--to keep people
in this belief is a matter of life or death to the State. Because, the moment
people come to doubt the necessity and possibility of such an inoculation of
morality, they will begin to doubt the higher mission of their rulers as well.

In this way everything--our religious, our historical, our legal, and our
social education--is imbued with the idea that man, left to himself, would soon
turn into a beast. If it were not for the authority exercised over them, people
would devour one another; nothing but brutality and war of each against all can
be expected from "the mob." It would perish, if the policeman, the sheriff and
the hangman--the chosen few, the salt of the earth--did not tower above it and
interpose to prevent the universal free-fight, to educate the people to respect
the sanctity of law and discipline, and with a wise hand lead them onward to
those times when better ideas shall find a nesting place in the "uncouth hearts
of men" and render the rod, the prison, and the gallows less necessary than they
are at present.

We laugh at a certain king who, on going into exile in 1848, said: "My poor
subjects; now they will perish without me!" We smile at the English clerk who
believes that the English are the lost tribe of Israel, appointed by God himself
to administer good government to "all other, lower races." But does not the
great majority of fairly educated people among all the nations entertain the same
exalted opinion with regard to itself?

__________

And yet, a scientific study of the development of human society and
institutions leads to an entirely different conclusion. It shows that the habits
and customs for mutual aid, common defense, and the preservation of peace, which
were established since the very first stages of human pre-historic times--and
which alone made it possible for man, under very trying natural conditions, to
survive in the struggle for existence,--that these social conventions have been
worked out precisely by this anonymous "mob." As to the so-called "leaders" of
humanity, they have not contributed anything useful that was not developed
previously in customary law; they may have emphasized (they nearly always
vitiated) some useful existing customs, but they have not invented them; while
they always strove, on their side, to turn to their own advantage the common-law
institutions that had been worked out by the masses for their mutual protection,
or, failing in this, endeavored to destroy them.

Even in the remotest antiquity, which is lost in the darkness of the stone
age, men already lived in societies. In these societies was already developed a
whole network of customs and sacred, religiously-respected institutions of the
communal regime or of the clan which rendered social life possible. And through
all the subsequent stages of development we find it was exactly this constructive
force of the "uninformed mob" that worked out new modes of life and new means for
mutual support and the maintenance of peace, as new conditions arose.

On the other hand, modern science has proved conclusively that Law--whether
proclaimed as the voice of a divine being or proceeding from the wisdom of a
lawgiver--never did anything else than prescribe already existing, useful habits
and customs, and thereby hardened them into unchangeable, crystallized forms.
And in doing this it always added to the "useful customs," generally recognized
as such, a few new rules--in the interest of the rich, warlike and armed
minority. "Thou shalt not kill," said the Mosaic law, "Thou shalt not steal,"
"Thou shalt not bear false witness," and then it added to these excellent
injunctions: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, his slave, nor his ass,"
which injunction legalized slavery for all time and put woman on the same level
as a slave and a beast of burden.

"Love your neighbor," said Christianity later on, but straightway added, in
the words of Paul the Apostle: "Slaves, be subject to your masters," and "There
is no authority but from God,"--thereby emphasizing the division of society into
slaves and masters and sanctifying the authority of the scoundrels who reigned at
Rome. The Gospels, though teaching the sublime idea of "no punishment for
offenses," which is, of course, the essence of Christianity--the token which
differentiates it and Buddhism from all other positive religions--speak at the
same time all the while about an avenging God who takes his revenge even upon
children, thus necessarily impressing upon mankind the opposite idea of
vengeance.

We see the same things in the laws of the so-called "Barbarians," that is, of
the Gauls, the Lombards, the Allemains, and the Saxons, when these people lived
in their communities, free from the Roman yoke. The Barbarian codes converted
into law an undoubtedly excellent custom which was then in the process of
formation: the custom of paying a penalty for wounds and killing, instead of
practicing the law of retaliation (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, wound
for wound, and death for death). But at the same time they also legalized and
perpetuated the division of freemen into classes--a division which only then
began to appear. They exacted from the offender varying compensations, according
as the person killed or wounded was a freeman, a military man, or a king (the
penalty in the last case being equivalent to life-long servitude). The original
idea of this scale of compensations to be paid to the wronged family according to
its social position, was evidently that a king's family of an ordinary freeman by
being deprived of its head, was entitled to receive a greater compensation. But
the law, by restating the custom, legalized for all time the division of people
into classes--and so legalized it that up to the present, a thousand years since,
we have not got rid of it.

And this happened with the legislation of every age, down to our own time.
The oppression of the preceding epoch was thus transmitted by law from the old
society to the new, which grew upon the ruins of the old. The oppression of the
Persian empire passed on to Greece; the oppression of the Macedonian empire, to
Rome; the oppression and cruelty of the Roman empire, to the mediæval
European States then just arising.

Every social safeguard, all forms of social life in the tribe, the commune,
and the early medæval town-republics; all forms of inter-tribal, and later
on inter-provincial, relations, out of which international law was subsequently
evolved; all forms of mutual support and all institutions for the preservation of
peace--including the jury,--were developed by the creative genius of the
anonymous masses. While all the laws of every age, down to our own, always
consisted of the same two elements: one which fixed and crystallized certain
forms of life that were universally recognized as useful; the other which was a
superstructure--sometimes even nothing but a cunning clause adroitly smuggled in
in order to establish and strengthen the growing power of the nobles, the king,
and the priest--to give it sanction.

So, at any rate, we are led to conclude by the scientific study of the
development of human society, upon which for the last thirty years not a few
conscientious men of science have labored. They themselves, it is true, seldom
venture to express such heretical conclusions as those stated above. But the
thoughtful reader inevitably comes to them on reading their works.

Chapter 00006 - The Causes of this Mistake.--The Teaching of the Church: "the World is steeped in Sin."--The Government's Inculcation of the same view of "Man's Radical Perversity."--The Views of Modern Anthropology upon this subject.--The Development of forms of life by the "Masses," and the LAw.--Its Two-fold Character.